Miracle in Bedford Falls

I recently had the chance to create a new poster for Miracle In Bedford Falls For Footlight Players in Charleston South Carolina. This play is a musical stage version of my all time favorite Christmas film It's A Wonderful Life. In case you somehow live in a cave and have missed the 1946 Frank Capra classic starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, you can watch it on Christmas Eve this year, like I do practically every year, much to my family's chagrin. I have somehow not instilled a love for the film in my children, but there is still hope. Anyway, back to the project at hand.

Creating new art for a story that is so iconic is a bit daunting and I didn't want to copy the familiar climactic family embrace that features prominently on most of the video versions of the film, so that was automatically out. Also, since this is a musical version, I wanted to somehow imply this aspect in the art. Other iconic symbols that I considered in the sketch phase were snow, Christmas bells, George Bailey, fir trees, holly, angel wings and more snow. I came up with four possible options to show the client of which, they chose the snow globe idea. We decided to add George to the snow globe from sketch one and add some musical notations to the swirls of snow.

Once again I created the hand lettering for this poster and incorporated it into the illustration. The client is thrilled with the result and I hope that it adds to the popularity of the production.